


if you love me, wake me

by freefallvertigo



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F, Grieving, Hurt/Comfort, prepare for a world of angst ladies and gays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-25 05:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16654915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freefallvertigo/pseuds/freefallvertigo
Summary: “If The Doctor was used to one thing, it was the sorrow in her bones.”Something is amiss on the Mourning Moon, but the team’s interference may cost Yaz her life if the Doctor can’t figure out a way to save her.





	if you love me, wake me

**Author's Note:**

> this isn’t rly what i had intended for it to be but i was losing my patience towards the end lmao i hope u enjoy it nonetheless x

It was the most heartbreaking scream the Doctor had heard in a very long time.

She, Yaz, Graham and Ryan had been intending to visit the Doctor’s old friend Cleopatra - whom the Doctor had name-dropped rather smugly - but instead had ended up opening the TARDIS doors to white rock and death. The Mourning Moon. The gang had been expecting sun, sand, pyramids, royalty. What they got was a graveyard.

The Mourning Moon, as the Doctor explained, voice sombre and respectful, was where all the dead of the corresponding planet were buried. Their population had swelled enormously in recent years, and henceforth the body count had, too. When the natives began to run out of soil to bury their dead in, they turned to the moon for a solution. They built tombs, crypts, mausoleums, statues, churches. A home for their grief, hanging in the night sky.

Ryan and Graham had thought it creepy. It was Yaz alone whose first thought had been not to recoil but to admire.

”I think it’s kind of beautiful, in a really sad way,” She had said, standing shoulder to shoulder with the Doctor in the doorway of the TARDIS. “I mean, imagine losing someone you love and being able to look up at the moon each night and feel them looking down at you. People die, but the moon won’t. Not any time soon.”

For the Doctor, it was one of those moments (and she had a lot of them) where she was reminded of just how lucky she was to have found Yaz. She had a unique kind of perspective. A rare one.

The Doctor cherished it.

Though the others had been keen to leave, something stopped the Doctor from flying away. The same thing that always stopped the Doctor from flying away: curiosity. Because something was amiss. 

“Amiss? On a moon full of bones?” Ryan’s tone had been laced with sarcasm. “Can’t think why.”

”Take a look outside, Ryan. What do you see?” The Doctor prompted, swivelling her screen around to show Ryan the view from the TARDIS. 

Ryan squinted at the screen. Graham and Yaz looked over his shoulder. He shrugged. “A big graveyard?”

”A huge graveyard, the biggest in the galaxy. Millions are buried here, millions upon millions, it stretches on forever. The sole purpose of this place is to give people a place to mourn their loved ones. So, what’s missing on the Mourning Moon?” 

It was Graham who answered. “Mourners.”

”Exactly!” The Doctor exclaimed. “Not a weeping widow or a fresh moonflower in sight. Why? Well, maybe the graveyard’s closed on Sundays. Or maybe...”

The Doctor allowed herself to trail off; allowed her companions to draw their own eerie conclusions. She had that look in her eye, now. It was the ‘I am very intrigued and I will not be leaving until my curiosity has been satisfied’ look. Her friends knew it well by now. At least, they knew it well enough to abandon any ideas they might still have had about Ancient Egypt.

Ryan sighed. ”We’re gonna go poking around in the creepy graveyard, aren't we?” 

“Yes we are, Ryan! Now suit up, gang,” The Doctor had a kind of dangerous half-smile on her face. “I have a feeling this is gonna be a good one.”

So, after putting on their space suits and hanging up their sun hats (Graham grumbling all the while), the four of them had opened up the TARDIS doors to another unprecedented adventure. Unbeknownst to them, a horror of unimaginable extent lurked at the periphery, hidden under cloak of the endless night.

Each of them were too taken by their surroundings to notice any such horrors. The nearby planet, as well as a second moon, were suspended in the black, round and pretty as marbles. The planet was a brilliant red and blue, broken up by occasional hues of pale yellow, and was at least three times the size of Earth. It was lunar night - no sun in the sky - but stars still dazzled, blanketing the vast expanse of space.

Then there was their more immediate environment.

As far as the eye could see, rows and rows of headstones and variations thereupon decorated the surface of the moon. Tunnels, which looked to have been made of glass but were in fact constructed of something much sturdier, had been built in lieu of pathways. The lights inside held the darkness at bay. In the near distance, the spire of a church loomed like a beacon. The Doctor and her company, after making it to the tunnels and lifting their visors, decided to head in that direction.

Yaz and the Doctor had walked further ahead, moving delicately among the dead. The Doctor couldn’t help but notice the expression on Yaz’s face, almost like she was lost. In a way, she was. 

“Everything alright, Yaz?” The Doctor asked, concerned.

Yaz looked across at the Doctor like she’d just brought the train of thought she was on to a screeching, grinding halt.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Kind of. I mean,” Yaz gestured broadly at their surroundings. “Look at this place. I don’t know what it is, it’s just, it’s got this terrible melancholy to it. I can’t describe it, Doctor, but everything inside me is telling me to leave. Don’t you feel it?”

She did.

The Doctor felt it.

Of course, they were standing on a moon sized burial ground. The Doctor didn’t think much of the sorrow in her bones for it quite literally came with the territory. And anyway, if the Doctor was used to one thing, it was the sorrow in her bones. She dismissed it as an awful energy that accompanied the harrowing knowledge of what lay underfoot.

She was soon to learn that that was a mistake.

If the melancholia had been their first warning sign, their first red flag, what they found in the church was undoubtedly the second. It was a huge building, built from metal but designed to appear as a normal church internally. Stained glass windows, lit by backlights, cast a distorted, colourful array of saintly light about the room. The Doctor’s companions did not recognise the god looming behind the lectern on the stage. It didn’t appear to be of human origin. Not the humanity they knew.

At first, it seemed they were alone in the church. Then they heard the unmistakable sound of a grown man crying. 

“Doctor,” Yaz breathed.

Yaz was looking at something in the corner of the room, something half hidden by shadow. The others followed her line of sight as the Doctor edged closer to the indiscernible shape. As she grew nearer, and as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she saw that it was a person. A man, huddled over with his head between his knees and his hands pressed to his ears. He was shaking. 

“Hello, there,” She said, stepping tentatively forwards. “I’m the Doctor, these are my friends. We’re here to help. Are you alright?”

The man only continued to shake and sob. 

“Listen, Doc, I don’t think you should get that close,” Graham warned. That bad feeling was getting worse. They all felt it, now, more potent than ever. “Something’s wrong. Something’s just... wrong.”

”It’s okay, I’m here to help,” The Doctor repeated, ignoring Graham’s advice. “Can you hear me?”

For a fleeting moment, Yaz swore she saw something in the corner of her eye. Only, when she turned her head, nothing was there except the empty pews and a closed door at the back of the church. If the Doctor hadn’t been otherwise occupied, she may have noticed the way Yaz fixed her stare on that door as if it had been calling out to her. 

As it was, there was a larger matter at hand. The Doctor crouched down in front of the man. Tenderly, she reached out a hand to lay on his shoulder. The second her fingers touched the fabric of his shirt, he jolted to life.

His head snapped up and he grabbed her roughly by the wrist. He looked at her with pale, dead eyes and a string of words, terrifying words, spilled from his mouth like blood from an open wound. “God’s dead. I saw it. The thing, it killed God. God’s dead. Hung him by the neck from the stars. Saw it. I saw it with my eyes. God’s dead! Dead! From the stars!”

And more of the same.

”Doc!”

Ryan and Graham were at the Doctor’s side in an instant, helping to separate her from the man.

The moment they broke contact, the man stopped shouting and returned to his previous position, head ducked low and tears flowing still. He mumbled things under his breath, things about god dying and the monster that killed it. Nonsensical, nightmarish stuff. 

The Doctor stood over the man, face set with unease.

”Look at the emblem on his shirt,” The Doctor said quietly without taking her eyes off him, referring to a patch that had been sewn into the cloth. “This man’s a priest. Was a priest. I think he might have lost his faith.”

”What’s he on about? God’s dead? What’s that mean?” Ryan was audibly spooked.

”Think it’s pretty self explanatory, don’t you?” The Doctor asked, pulling out her sonic screwdriver and scanning the sobbing priest. 

“Yeah, but, come on...” Ryan scoffed. “God? Really?”

”Well. I did kill the devil,” The Doctor mumbled, only a fraction of her focus on the conversation at hand as she studied the readings on her screwdriver. “This is not good. Very not good. The antithesis of good.”

”What’s it saying?” Graham asked. “What’s wrong with him?”

The Doctor tucked the sonic screwdriver back into her inside pocket, eyes falling over the priest once more. This time they were laden with sympathy for him. She had seen similar readings before. Once. A very long time ago. “He’s infected.”

”With what?” 

“Grief.”

Graham and Ryan exchanged a look. Sometimes, the more the Doctor spoke, the less they understood. 

“How can someone be infected with grief? It’s just an emotion, init?” Graham queried. 

“Quite right, Graham. Just an emotion, but probably the biggest one there is. It’s an emotion that takes the stars out of your sky and paints your whole world black,” The Doctor talked fast and low. This was an area she knew a lot about. “That kind of raw, albeit negative energy can draw all sorts of attention. Especially if there’s enough of it in the air. And oh, haven’t you been able to feel it crawling under your skin since the second we arrived?”

”Well, if I wasn’t scared before...” Graham muttered.

“We should be scared. We should all be very, very scared. Do you know why?” The Doctor spun on her heels, looked Graham dead in the eye, noses inches apart. “Because I haven’t heard a single word out of Yaz in a minute too long.”

Three heads turned. 

Yaz was gone, and the door at the far end of the church was open.

The Doctor’s stomach lurched with the realisation that her best friend had slipped away unnoticed. Worse still was that she was now fairly sure she knew precisely what kind of danger stalked the graves; had figured out just what breed of monster would keep billions of mourners from visiting their loved ones. It was something constructed of pure evil; an ancient evil as old as the universe and as inevitable as the death of all things.

If ever the Doctor had been so scared for Yaz’s safety, she couldn’t recall a time. 

“Where’d she go?” Ryan took several steps towards the door. “She was right there a second ago.”

The Doctor ran past the boys, down the navel of the church, and through the open door. Ryan and Graham followed close behind. The Doctor’s hearts beat something wicked in her chest. Silently, she begged for Yaz to be safe and sound on the other side of the doorway. _Just allow me this. Please. Just let her be safe. Let Yaz be safe._ She wasn’t even sure who she was praying to.

God was dead, after all.

The room on the other side of the door looked like a visitor’s centre. Screens in the wall revealed maps of each section of the Mourning Moon, distinguishable by religion and class, along with a complete archive of the dead. The help desk was unmanned. Three lifts offered the option to go left, right, above, or below. Yaz was not there.

The Doctor stopped short, despaired.

Yaz was not there. 

“I don’t understand, why would she leave?” Ryan sounded as panicked as the Doctor felt. Almost. 

“She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t just leave,” The Doctor said, pacing back and forth and locking her hands behind her head. “Not unless there was something... Okay guys, listen up, because the next advice I give is gonna be extremely important and if we ever want to see Yaz alive again you have to listen closely, alright?”

”Doc, you’re scaring me,” Graham confessed.

”Same, man,” Ryan agreed. “Where’s Yaz? What’s happened to her?”

The Doctor’s face was solemn. “It lured her away. Somewhere private, where it can feed in peace. Somewhere we won’t get in the way. But don’t worry, because I’m gonna get her back. If it kills me, I’ll get her back.”

The Doctor’s palms felt clammy and she hoped Graham and Ryan had more faith in her right now than she had in herself. Defeating the creature was possible, but it promised the risk of great sacrifice. Irreversible damage. That said, for Yaz, the Doctor would sacrifice anything. Failing was not an option. 

Losing Yaz was not an option.

”Hang on, feed in peace? Is Yaz gonna get eaten?”

”No, no, no. If I’m right, and all the readings I’ve been getting plus every instinct in my body tells me I am, then this moon is playing host to a Feeder,” The Doctor explained. “This one in particular is the nastiest of the lot. It’s name is Woe. It doesn’t feed on the flesh but on the emotions. One emotion. Grief.”

The history of Woe was long and complex and shrouded in doubt, myth, half-truths, but the Doctor did her best to condense her knowledge of it into a brief, ten second explanation, disconcertingly aware of the time constraint they were working against. She explained that Woe was a being rumoured to phase in and out of existence, reemerging (perhaps creating itself anew) in periods of great loss. Throughout history, Woe was most often sighted in the aftermath of war, visiting those who had lost the most and to whom hope seemed little more than an estranged memory. 

It used the grief of the bereft against them, crawling inside their heads as if in mourning their minds had become vulnerable to invaders. Then it would amplify their grief in a manner so extreme that the few who survived the initial process lost their minds, became shells of who they once had been, and more often than not ended up taking their own lives.

The greater the grief, the fuller the meal, the more content Woe would be.

“But why choose Yaz?” Ryan asked, after the Doctor had given them the highlights. “I mean, if this thing’s looking for grief, the three of us have got plenty to spare. Yaz isn’t grieving anyone.”

”I know, I know, it doesn’t make sense yet,” The Doctor said, frustrated. “But until I figure that out, here’s what I need you to do, and this is possibly the most important thing you will ever do in your lives. I need you to think happy thoughts.”

Graham’s face was coloured with doubt. “Sorry?”

”There’s something out there sucking the life out of Yaz and you want us to think happy thoughts?” Ryan reiterated. 

“Yes. Correct. Happy thoughts, the absolute happiest,” The Doctor pressed on. “Remember what we’re up against. It’s drawn to misery like a shark to blood and its receptors are extremely sensitive, so each of you, I need you to think of the happiest moment in your life. I’m so sorry, but it can’t be laced with grief. It can’t be about Grace, or anyone you’ve lost. Focus, with every ounce of will you have, on something untainted by loss. Something good. Something so, so good.”

”I dunno if I can do that, Doc,” Graham said. “Can’t even remember a time when I was as happy as I was when I was with Grace.”

”I’m sorry, Graham, I am,” The Doctor said with total sincerity. “But you have to. If Woe comes for us, Yaz won’t be the only one in trouble. Woe never just claims one victim. Not ever. So think, smile, trick your brain into thinking you are positively elated. Your life depends on it.”

”There’s a happy thought for you,” Graham said. 

“And what about Yaz?” Ryan wondered aloud, forever putting his friends first.  

“I’m gonna save her. Duh,” The Doctor said, turning away, withdrawing her sonic, and scanning the lifts. Only now that she had her back to Graham and Ryan did she allow the first sign of genuine fear to darken her eyes. She closed them, for no more than a fraction of a second, and visualised Yaz. Yaz, smiling. Yaz, with a flower in her hair. Yaz, and her mum, and her close-knit family, and her little flat in Sheffield. 

That was her happy thought.

Yaz.

 _I’m coming for you_ , she thought, and hoped beyond reason that somehow Yaz could hear her.

The second elevator had been the last one in use. The three of them piled inside, each clinging to whatever moments of unfettered happiness they could recall at present, and the Doctor tampered with the mechanics so that the lift would take them to the same destination it had last visited.

The lift carried them down. Underground.

As they descended, an unlikely chill seeped into their suits and gnawed at their flesh with teeth of frost. Logically, as they got further and further from the surface, the temperature should have risen. That the inverse was actually true told the Doctor they were probably headed in the right direction. Woe: leech of light, life, and warmth.

Perhaps it had finally met its match with the Doctor, for she had all of those things in abundance. The strain it would take to rob her of them. The sheer power. Was there a being alive strong enough?

By the time the doors slid open on sub-level six, the Doctor could see her breath materialising in front of her like a mist. Graham had his hands tucked under his armpits whilst Ryan tried in vain to keep his teeth from chattering. The walls of the corridor had a blue, icy sheen to them. No doubt about it now - Woe had been here. Recently.

”D’you feel that?” Ryan whispered. “That feeling, it’s gotten worse. It’s like...”

Except Ryan didn’t know how to finish that sentence, because there were no words in his vocabulary that might have been able to describe exactly what he felt. He only knew that it was a terrible, terrible thing inside of him, something that whispered of death but felt like a living entity coiling around his heart and soul. 

Graham and The Doctor responded with further silence, because they each were sharing in that same sensation.

”Happy thoughts,” The Doctor reminded them, though the futility of their effort to remain positive was becoming plainer and plainer. In her mind’s eye, once more, she pictured Yaz. This time, she recalled what Yaz looked like in a very human, mundane moment of simply existing. Like the slight crease of her brow when she was concentrating, the way she nodded and smiled to let you know she was listening, how her jaw went tight when something irked her but she was trying not to fly off the handle.

She thought of Yaz’s hand holding her own that first time they had all pulled the lever together. She held on to that.

At least, she tried to.

The memory dissolved when she heard that scream. 

That heartbreaking, soul destroying scream that could only ever have come from one person. Yaz had only ever spoken the Doctor’s name softly, and each time she had, the Doctor had melted at the sound of it leaving her lips. Something about hearing her own name in the mouth of a person she loved felt so indescribably intimate to her. Now, the Doctor’s name was leaving Yaz’s lips once more. 

But she was screaming it. 

If she could have, she’d have removed herself from any association with the word Doctor right there and then, if only because hearing the agony Yaz poured into its every syllable tore her apart from the inside. It made her never want to hear that word again. Never. 

The Doctor’s feet were carrying her towards the sound of Yaz’s scream even before the echo of it ricocheted off the walls and back into her ears as something of a sick encore. That despondent melancholy inside of her transformed into a wave of sickness. She felt ill with dread. What in the world could make a person scream like that? 

Graham and Ryan hot on her heels, the Doctor barrelled through the last door on the left. 

Once inside the room, they skidded to a sudden halt.

The room was vast and filled with stone monuments and sculptures intended to mark graves, as well as headstones as yet to be engraved with dead names and epitaphs. The last light flickered. Shadows danced in and out of the realm of existence. And there, lying in the centre of the room, was Yaz. 

And hovering over her unconscious body: Woe.

Woe itself was hard to look at, for to behold its visual form hurt not only the eyes but the mind and body, too. The Doctor fought the urge to cast her eyes away; forced herself to endure the pain that she might get a good look at this thing who would dare touch a hair on Yaz’s head. 

It was a haunting, shadowy figure. Its body looked as if it had been forged from wisps of black smoke, from fog and blackest night, from misery and terror. Woe’s head was not so much a head as it was a skull, almost like that of a ram except with three long, twisted black horns whose pointed edges were sharp enough to shave diamonds. Its eye sockets might have resembled black holes if not for the fire burning inside of them. Literal fire. Its burning light was the only thing illuminating Yaz’s face, though the Doctor couldn’t be sure if it was the ungodly glow or something else which was causing Yaz to look so sickly.

”Oh my god,” Ryan and Graham breathed simultaneously. 

The Doctor’s blood ran cold; a river of ice in motion. Yet she remained motionless. Yaz lay dying on the floor and the Doctor couldn’t move. It was as if everything useful had been carved out of her like guts out of a pumpkin and all that remained was a hollow space contained by mere flesh. 

“Doctor!” Ryan shouted. “Aren’t you gonna do something? Aren’t you gonna save her?”

 _Save her_.

“Yes,” The Doctor blinked. Then again. She seemed to remember herself. “Yes. Yes! Yasmin Khan, hold on for me, ‘cos I am gonna rescue you! Just you wait and see!”

Their one, their only, advantage, was that Woe was paying no interest at all to any of them. Draining the light from a person’s eyes must have taken every ounce of concentration it had. So when the Doctor rushed over to Yaz’s side and scanned her full anatomy with her screwdriver, Woe didn’t do a thing to stop her. 

“Poison,” The Doctor concluded. “Looking at her brain activity, I’d guess she’s been administered some kind of hallucinogen. An incredibly powerful one.”

What the Doctor didn’t say was that Yaz’s vital signs were weak, her body growing tired under the exhaustion of pure, black grief gripping her by her bones. Kneeling so close to Yaz, the Doctor saw that her lips were turning blue and there was an unnatural kind of frost clinging to her clothes and skin. It was all the Doctor could do not to fall apart at the sight of Yaz without that lovely warmth she exuded so effortlessly. 

But the Doctor would bring it back. She’d bring Yaz back.

Whatever it took. 

“Poison? Why would they give her a hallucinogen? What’s the point?” Graham asked. 

“Must be a Feeder’s plan B. They finish their feast of mourners and have to resort to drastic measures so they don’t starve,” The Doctor guessed. “Makes sense. They administer a kind of venom, induce hallucinations of their victims losing loved ones, and then feed off the artificial grief they’ve created. Also explains our friend, the Priest. Deluded into believing he watched his god die.”

“But you can help her, right?”

The Doctor looked into the eyes of Woe. There were few exceptions to the Doctor’s code, a code which assured all living things a second chance at life, at being good, at changing. Woe was one such exception. There would be no negotiating with the embodiment of grief; with a soulless vulture scouring the universe for those so weak and broken they could not defend their own minds. Besides, the Doctor wasn’t convinced Woe was a living thing at all. It closer resembled death. 

And anyway, it was hurting Yaz.

Anything or anyone that ever hurt Yaz, no matter how far they ran, be it to the dawn of time or to the collapse of the conceivable universe, to parallel universes or inside of the time vortex itself, would never escape the Doctor’s wrath. For she would find them. The Doctor was sure of one thing in that moment: whatever happened next, Woe would not survive that day.

“Tell me you’ve got a plan, Doc,” Graham implored. 

“I’ve got a plan, Graham,” The Doctor told him, and it was true. Technically she had two plans. She hoped it wouldn’t come to plan B. “Little known fact about me, lads: I’m telepathic. A touch telepath. So, I’m gonna strap on my life vest, dive into the deep end of Yaz’s mind, and hope we both don’t drown in there. Wish me luck!”

Without waiting for a response, the Doctor touched her fingers to Yaz’s temples and submersed herself in her psyche.

Almost instantaneously, the doctor felt time slowing down. Actually felt it. Whatever Woe was doing inside of Yaz’s head, it had taken the liberty of extending her seconds into hours, her hours into weeks. More time to savour the meal, the Doctor supposed. At that, she felt an impossible, seething anger rise up in the depths of her stomach. To Yaz, she had already been suffering for days.

The Doctor followed the unmistakable song of a broken heart. 

As the song grew louder, the Doctor waded through Yaz’s memories. Usually, there were more good than bad, but something had happened to Yaz’s good memories. They had turned grey, null, void. Woe, the ultimate sadist, had vomited up its unending devastation into the contents of Yaz’s mind and now it was poisoning everything it touched.

Like a plague, it had spread. The Doctor could already feel Yaz’s will crumbling as she grew weaker still. She’d have to hurry if she wanted to save her.

She followed the song to the deepest recesses of Yaz’s mind. There, she stumbled across a blue door. TARDIS blue. Yaz’s broken heart and its somber tune bled through the crack beneath the door. The Doctor hadn’t needed to ask for entry - the door swung open for her of its own accord. Like it had been waiting.

The Doctor, apprehensive and wary of Woe’s stifling presence across all reaches of Yaz’s mind, hesitated only a second before pressing on past the blue door. 

The song ended. 

The Doctor found herself standing in the console room of the TARDIS, only she wasn’t alone. Yaz was there, and so was she. A projection, a construct, a memory. This was it, then. The heart of Yaz’s grief; the terminal disease inside of her. Unseen, the Doctor waited at the outskirts of the hallucination. In order to help Yaz, she would first have to understand what was ailing her. This was going to be hard to watch - she could tell.

Silently, she watched Yaz and the imagined Doctor conversing, though she couldn’t recall this conversation ever taking place. There was a dream-like tint to this world in Yaz’s head, all soft edges and saturated colours. The calm before the storm. 

The false Doctor said something and Yaz laughed. The real Doctor closed her eyes and savoured Yaz’s laughter as if it were her favourite piece of music. Maybe it was. 

Forever searching for silver linings, the Doctor sought comfort in the fact that she was present in this happier part of the construct. It offered her some sense of solace to know Yaz thought of her as a safe place; an anchor to that which was good in the world. That would help. 

The TARDIS began to shake violently then, as if caught in the middle of a solar storm or a meteor shower. The lights dimmed, flickered, turned red and flooded the place with a dangerous atmosphere. As the false Doctor tried desperately to tame her ship, Yaz was thrown back against the railing. It was all the Doctor could do not to run to her; she had to remind herself that none of this was real. 

Finally, the TARDIS stilled.

The worst, however, was yet to come. 

Smoke rose from the console, and that red light, it was everywhere. The smoke danced in its beams like this living, suffocating thing. Then the Doctor realised that it _was_ living. The smoke drifted into one spot, wisps twisting and winding together, grey turning to black, a bone white, fire-eyed head materialising from thin air. Woe.

The fake Doctor was standing beneath it as it hovered over her, menacing in its silence. Yaz, only just recovering from the impact of the crash, struggled to her feet. She lifted her head, saw Woe floating there, an intruder in the last safe place in her entire world, and her eyes widened. The Doctor thought it looked like she recognised Woe.

”No, not again!” Yaz screamed, and it was like she was remembering something then. Remembering that his had all happened before. But just how many times? “ _Doctor! Run!_ ”

Tears prickled the real Doctor’s eyes as it dawned on her then what all this had been leading up to. The person Woe had taken from Yaz, the person responsible for her mortal, life-ending grief, was the Doctor. From a whole host of people Yaz loved, Woe had deemed the Doctor’s loss the one to devastate Yaz the most; had decided that losing the Doctor would destroy Yaz in a way nothing else could. If this was Yaz’s hell, it was the Doctor’s too. 

“Run!” Yaz screamed again, voice hoarse.

The Doctor didn’t want to see this, but how could she turn away? 

She watched the events that unfolded next as thought it all was happening in slow motion. Yaz, pushing herself off of the railing and running towards the Doctor. Woe, sprouting two skeletal arms and reaching for the false Doctor. The false Doctor, standing perfectly still as if inviting death to take her. 

Woe snapped the Doctor’s neck.

Time slowed again as the false Doctor fell, dead before she hit the ground.

Yaz screamed one last time. A primal, raw, world ending scream. It was the last sound made before the universe fell silent; in its stead the heartbreak song, like a knife between the Doctor’s ribs, began to play. It emanated from every particle in the air, from the slow beating in Yaz’s chest, from the heart of the TARDIS, from the Doctor’s limp body. The only piece of music Yaz would know again, and it was the sound her soul made when it shattered. 

Yaz fell to her knees by the Doctor’s side. Heart heavy, the real Doctor watched Yaz pick her head up in her hands and, mouth moving without words to accompany the shapes it made, beg the Doctor to come back to life, to not be dead, to perform one last miracle. Yaz’s tears fell onto the dead Doctor’s cheek, but the real, living Doctor swore she could feel the ghost of them on her own face. 

Yaz pressed her lips against the Doctor’s forehead, sobbing violently, still holding her body in her arms. She was repeating the same thing, over and over again, as if it would somehow bring the Doctor back to life. 

The Doctor knew, even with the volume turned off, what Yaz was saying.

 _I love you, I love you, I love you._  

Woe, now suspended in the air above Yaz, had succeeded in doing what the Doctor had never thought possible. It had taken something so divine and noble as the act of loving unconditionally, and turned it into a weapon. It had disfigured the face of romance and feasted upon its rotting flesh. The Doctor had seen enough.

It wouldn’t be long before Woe reset the construct and Yaz was forced to live through this hellish trauma all over again. The Doctor would sooner die than let that happen, which she did realise created something of a paradox. 

She stepped out of the shadows, breaching the nightmare. The second she did so, the TARDIS began to tremble. The Doctor shouted Yaz’s name but her voice was stolen from her. Only the song remained. With every step she took towards Yaz, she was met with further resistance, as if a gale force wind were holding her back. Or trying to. 

It was gonna take more than that to keep her away from Yaz. 

Gritting her teeth, and holding on to the railing with white knuckles, the Doctor continued towards her weeping friend, who was still crouched over her body. Sparks flew from the console, and those sparks became flames, which became a roaring fire enveloping the entirety of the TARDIS. The closer the Doctor got, the more obstacles Woe threw her way. Each of them she ignored. Yaz, apparently, was too grief-stricken to notice a thing. Woe had her in a bubble. 

The Doctor had almost reached her; she was only a matter of feet away now. Flames licked at her boots, her shins, her knees. Invisible arms tried to hold her back. The smoke in the air climbed down her throat and choked her. Slowly. Painfully. The Doctor extended her arm, edging closer centimetre by centimetre, fingers stretched as far as they would reach. 

Woe grew in size, growing a shadow five times larger than itself. Skeletal arms sprouted from its sides yet again, and yet again they were coming for the Doctor. The real one this time.

The Doctor had no idea what would happen if they got to her, and thankfully she had no intentions of finding out. With one last great push, fuelled by the crushing fear of losing Yaz forever, the Doctor closed the distance between herself and Yaz. Her fingers wrapped themselves around Yaz’s arm. The bubble burst. Yaz looked up, into the Doctor’s anxious, hazel eyes, and the false Doctor turned to dust in her lap.

The song ended abruptly, with a sputter and a choke and then nothing. 

“Doctor,” Yaz gasped.

”I love you, too, Yasmin Khan,” The Doctor professed. “And I am very much alive.”

They both awoke at the exact same moment, Yaz lurching upright and the Doctor stumbling backwards away from her. The Doctor’s vision was blurred, her cheeks wet. She had been crying. The Doctor and Yaz, after gaining their bearings, locked eyes. They searched one another as if struggling to believe that this was reality, that they were both breathing and conscious and in the present. Yaz threw her arms around the Doctor and the Doctor was quick to reciprocate the embrace, squeezing Yaz tightly in her hold and laughing into her hair. 

“Doctor, watch out!” Ryan shouted. 

The girls separated and the Doctor was on her feet instantly, standing between Woe and Yaz, protecting her with nothing but her body. Woe was still hungry, its meal unfinished, plate not clean. It advanced towards them. The Doctor’s plan A had been to somehow defeat Woe in Yaz’s psyche, but it had been too strong; its hold on Yaz too powerful. 

Which left plan B.

”Everyone, get behind me!” The Doctor shouted, and her friends obliged. “Yaz, it still wants you, it wants to get back inside your head. Whatever you do, whatever happens now, you don’t let it. Promise me!”

”I promise,” Yaz vowed, not realising what she may have been risking by making that promise.

Without breaking eye contact with Woe, the Doctor reached behind her and squeezed Yaz’s hand once. Then she let go. She took a step in Woe’s direction. She would have to be brave, now, because if she wasn’t brave enough then Yaz was going to die and it would be all her fault. 

“Whatever happens,” The Doctor looked at Graham and Ryan. “You hold her back.”

Graham was the only one whose grave expression suggested he knew what the Doctor was planning. “On Grace’s life, I’ll keep her safe, Doc.”

Woe was advancing still, drifting like a black cloud towards them. An approaching storm. The others backed away. The Doctor, however, stood her ground. “Oi, you big old cloud! Still hungry are we?”

Woe roared again. It sounded like thunder.

”Yeah, I’ll bet you are, you stupid thing,” The Doctor goaded. “All this time, you’ve had an all you can eat buffet prancing around in front of your eyes and you’ve been too stupid to see it, eh! You want grief? Come and get it! I’ve got grief to spare, I’ve got grief comin’ out of my ears.”

”Doctor, what are you doing?” Yaz shouted. 

The Doctor ignored her. “Look at me. Really look at me, see me, see what I am. See how old these eyes are. Come on, you know what I am, how long I’ve lived. Tell me who I am. Go on, bit of extra credit for you.”

Woe stopped. It looked into her soul, its fire burning holes in her irises. _Doctor_ , it spoke without a mouth, into her head. _Time Lord_.

”Absolutely. I’m the Doctor, the last of the Time Lords, the soldier, the sole survivor, the killer, the bleeding heart,” The Doctor, as she spoke, unlocked a floodgate somewhere inside of herself; knocked down a wall that had been keeping all of her hurt at bay for so long. She felt it coming like a tsunami-scale wave. “Someone who’s lived as long as I have, fought in as many battles as me, well, they’ve gotta have a pretty big body count in their wake, mate. Thing is, I don’t just mourn my friends. Nah. I mourn for all the civilisations lost, the ones I didn’t get to save. I mourn for the last flicker of good that died out and left only a bad man behind. I mourn for my enemies. I mourn for the stars. I mourn for lost time, lost love. The fabric of my soul is forged from grief alone. And I’m offering it all to you. So take it. Have your fill, and leave my friends alone!”

”Don’t you dare!” Yaz surged forwards.

Graham, holding up to his word, locked his arms around her and held her back. Oh, but she struggled. Ryan simply watched on, mouth agape, in shock. Woe rose up above the Doctor, a decision having been made.

“Not again, Doctor,” Yaz cried out. “You can’t put me through this again. I want to wake up now. I want to wake up.”

The Doctor’s bravest act of all was resisting every voice in her head that screamed at her to comfort Yaz, to turn around and give her a winning smile and take her hand and tell her everything was gonna work out just fine. She clenched her jaw, kept her eyes forward, and braced herself. 

 _Lend me your eyes, Doctor_ , Woe commanded.

The Doctor obeyed, looking into the fire that blazed in the depths of Woe’s black sockets and falling into a paralytic trance. No turning back, now. From this point on, she could only give to Woe everything it had ever wanted.

It was unfortunate for Woe, she thought, that nobody had ever taught it to be careful what it wished for. 

She felt Woe enter her mind, and then she felt nothing but agony. 

A concentrated stream of all the loss and consequent misery amassed by the Doctor throughout her incredibly long life expelled itself from her every pore, absorbed instantly by a demonic entity whose greed knew no bounds. An ocean of faces, familiar and familial and so, so painful to think of, erupted like lava from a volcano and Woe swallowed that burning ocean whole. She gave it dead planets, genocide, love lost to parallel realities, the overwhelming regret of forgetting and then remembering once more. She washed the blood from her hands and allowed Woe to lap it all up, every last drop, like the ravenous beast it was.

The Doctor hadn’t even given Woe half of what it asked for when the fire in its eyes began to flicker blue, red, green, orange, blue again. 

 _Stop_ , Woe screamed soundlessly.

But the Doctor wasn’t finished. Breaking the paralysis, she reached a hand into the shadowy chest of the beast and wrapped her ice cold fingers around the very core of its being. The Doctor had something else she wanted to give; this grief belonged not to her, but to Woe itself. It was the last time she had encountered Feeders, her and her fellow Time Lords, among them another incarnation of Woe. A great battle had raged, many were lost, and the Feeders came calling. 

They made the fatal mistake of feeding from raw Time Lord energy, and all of them - every single Feeder - had perished. 

 _No!_ Woe was screaming inside her head. _Release me! Please! It hurts!_

“That’s called grief, and it doesn’t belong to me,” The Doctor said, voice level but somehow filled with rage. “Oh no, that’s all yours. That’s all you. And I’m sorry, I really am, because only in your dying moment are you able to become something slightly resembling humane. Only right now, in your last few seconds of existence, would I deem you a thing worth mourning.”

Woe made a high-pitched, ear splitting sound that resembled something like a wailing animal caught between the jaws of a predator, and then it blinked out of existence. It disintegrated into atoms, only its skull remaining.

The skull dropped to the floor, a crack shooting up the centre of the bone upon impact, the sockets devoid of fire now and for the rest of time.

Quiet settled about the room, an immense quiet broken up only by the Doctor’s heavy breathing. Slowly, she turned her head towards Yaz, whom was still being half restrained and half hugged by Graham. Yaz was speechless. She opened her mouth and then closed it once more. 

The Doctor, with her last ounce of strength, smiled at Yaz. “Gotcha,” Then her legs gave way and she fell back against the statue of a saint.

Yaz ran for the Doctor and this time Graham let her go. She slung one of the Doctor’s arms across her shoulders and looped one of her own arms around the Doctor’s waist. “Someone get her a chair!”

The colour had drained from the Doctor’s face and her skin was as cold as Yaz’s had been just moments prior. Her eyelids hung low, eyes partially glazed over. Ryan had found a memorial bench, and now he and Graham were dragging it across the floor towards the Doctor. Yaz helped her over to it and sat her down gently. 

“Doctor, can you hear me?” Yaz crouched in front of her, one hand on her cheek, the other resting on her knee. 

The Doctor’s head lolled back. She closed her eyes and exhaled deeply. “I’ll be fine,” She promised. “Just a little bit out of it. Nothing a quick sugar fix won’t solve. Check my pockets. Quick as you like.”

Yaz wasted no time. She patted down the Doctor’s space suit, unzipping a compartment over her hip and retrieving a custard cream. Yaz frowned, giving the Doctor a quizzical look. 

“Ah!” The Doctor plucked the biscuit from Yaz’s fingers. She bit it in half, chewed slowly, and hummed a content hum as she swallowed. “Just what I needed. Thanks, Yaz. Life saver.”

Yaz scoffed. “Are you insane? Doctor, what the hell were you thinking?” She exploded.

Graham, standing off to the side, nudged Ryan’s shoulder with his own. “We, uh, better go check on the Priest, yeah?”

”Right, yeah,” Ryan nodded. “Priest. We’ll see you up there.”

Neither Yaz nor the Doctor acknowledged them as they shuffled off back towards the church. The Doctor had paused mid-chew at Yaz’ accusatory tone; at the look in her eye that suggested she was ready to kill a man. With her cheek the shape of a golf ball, she looked like a squirrel storing nuts.

”I was thinking,” The Doctor said, words muffled through the mouthful of food. “That I was really hungry. Having the life almost drained out of you works up quite an appetite. Want a bite?” She offered the rest of the biscuit to Yaz.

”I’m not talking about the custard cream, Doctor,” Yaz sighed. 

“Oh,” The Doctor nodded, swallowed her food. “Because I would have brought two if I’d known we were both gonna have our heads probed by a merciless grief demon.”

”Can you just take this seriously? Please?” Yaz pleaded. 

All traces of humour flickered out of the Doctor’s eyes when she realised how sincere Yaz was. The Doctor had been trying to lighten the mood, alleviate the feeling of hopeless anguish Woe had left behind in the room like a bad smell. But jokes weren’t what Yaz needed - she could see that. 

The Doctor patted the empty space on the bench beside her. “Sit.”

Yaz sat. 

“What is it?” The Doctor asked patiently.

Yaz looked down at her lap. “That thing wanted me. It wanted my grief. Why’d you have to go and offer yourself to it? It almost killed you.”

”It almost killed you, too,” The Doctor countered. “Yaz, if you think I’m the kind of person who’s capable of standing by and watching anybody - least of all someone as good and kind and decent as you - get the light drained out of them, then you don’t know me at all.”

Yaz lifted her eyes warily up to meet the Doctor’s. The Doctor gave her a subtle, encouraging smile and reached out to hold her hand.

“Besides, you got into this mess because of me,” The Doctor said. “For that, I truly am sorry. If anything had happened to you...”

”It wasn’t your fault, Doctor, don’t be stupid,” Yaz argued. “You don’t have to apologise.”

The Doctor paused. “How many times did you watch me die?” She asked, softly. “I know your internal time stream was slowed down, Yaz, and I know it didn’t feel to you like you were only out for a couple of minutes. How many times did you watch me die?”

Yaz went quiet for a moment. She looked down at their interwoven hands, mouth a straight line, chest rising and falling steadily. “A hundred and sixty eight. I watched you die a hundred and sixty eight times, in a hundred and sixty eight different ways,” Her voice started to break towards the end of the last sentence and the Doctor squeezed her hand as she regained her composure. “Each time, at the start, I would forget. But then that thing would come back and it was like I could remember everything all of a sudden. And I always knew what was coming, I knew you were about to die, but I could never do anything about it. No matter how fast I ran or how loud I shouted.”

Yaz closed her eyes. A tear tracked down her cheek. 

“Hey, hey,” The Doctor thumbed her tear away. “None of that was real, okay? I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. It was just an illusion, a hallucination. We’re safe.”

“But, Doctor,” Yaz placed one of her hands over the hand the Doctor was resting on her cheek. “Even right now, sitting here, touching you, I’m not a hundred percent sure this is real. I keep waiting for that thing to come back and snap your neck or string you up or swallow you whole. How do I know I’m awake? How do I know?”

The Doctor felt both her hearts break into a thousand pieces; felt each of those broken pieces split in two. She had done this. She had brought another pure, beautiful soul onto the TARDIS, and now she was tainting it with trauma. She felt wholly responsible. 

“Tell you what, whenever you doubt it, come to me,” The Doctor said. “I’ll show you the lifeless skull of that creature, and I’ll hold your hand, and I’ll stay with you until you feel safe again. I promise you, this feeling will fade. You will get better.”

Which was true. Woe had not finished with Yaz when the Doctor rescued her, which meant she would fully recover. The Doctor, however, had given Woe everything. Full, three course meal, appetisers and all. In every cell of her body, a cold grief, an immeasurable amount of regret and guilt, lingered behind. She felt as if there were a black hole somewhere inside of her, devouring everything benevolent, everything of colour and life. She knew without a doubt that if she scanned herself with her sonic, it would come back with the same readings as the Priest. 

If she’d been human, it would have sent her mad and killed her.

As it were, she was a Time Lord, which meant she could only do one thing: endure. Endure and fight it. The feeling would likely never leave her now, for it had burrowed into the depths of her soul. So she’d just have to get used to it and vow to never let it turn her cold. No more compartmentalising, no more forgetting (or pretending to forget) every unbearable aspect of her past. The Doctor’s heart would forever be on her sleeve from here on out. And she was just going to have to take it. 

This was the great sacrifice of killing Woe; the sacrifice she had knowingly and willingly made in order to save Yaz.

And she’d do it again in a heartbeat.


End file.
